Oscar Chatter: Harris-Perry Still Going In On “The Help”

Professor and MSNBC talk show host, Melissa Harris-Perry has made no secret of her disdain for “The Help” movie. From the time that it hit the big screen, she has been one of its most vocal critics, stating that she needed “worker’s compensation” after viewing it for MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell. Calling the film “deeply troubling” and “ahistorical,” she held nothing back when speaking about the stereotypical, white-washed depiction of the Old South’s Jim Crow era:

This is not a movie about the lives of black women,” she clarified, as their lives were not, she argued, “Real Housewives of Jackson, Mississippi… it was rape, it was lynching, it was the burning of communities.” She then explained that it was, to her, completing the work started by the Daughters of the American Confederacy when they “found money in the federal budget to erect a granite statue of Mammy in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial,” which happened while the same Senate contingency failed to pass the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill. “It is the same notion that the fidelity of black women domestics is more important than the realities of the lives, the pain, the anguish, the rape that they experienced.”

She even live-tweeted her disgust:

Well, now Oscar night is here.

As Viola Davis graced the red carpet in a jewel green gown, de-wigged with afro exposed in all of its glorious natural beauty, the conversation continues to swirl around the issue of whether or not the Black community should be happy about a win for either Davis or Octavia Spencer — in the categories of Best Actress and Supporting Actress respectively — for playing maids.

Once again, Harris-Perry is leading the charge.

See below for the segment where she lays out her argument against “The Help.”